When and how did Chile come into your life?

On October 30, 1998, on my way to my grandfather’s funeral service at the cemetery of Pantin in Paris, I received a phone call from my office in London. I was informed that the lawyers of Augusto Pinochet, who had just been arrested in London, had asked me to assist them in their client's defence. Was I available to argue that he was immune from the jurisdiction of proceedings to extradite him to Spain?

Arriving at the cemetery, I informed my wife of the news. Will you take the case, she asked. I told her that, like a taxi driver, a barrister cannot refuse a client. Do it if you want, she said, but I will divorce. Her mother was a Spanish civil war refugee, so representing Pinochet was like acting for General Franco. I declined. Three days later, the other side contacted me, and I worked against Pinochet, for almost two years, while he was in London. During this period I began to forge close links with Chileans, and not long after I travelled to Chile for the first time, to give some lectures.

After your first encounter with Chile via the Pinochet case, it was your investigations into the fate of Nazi war criminals that led you back there.

Indeed, sixteen years later, in 2016, while researching the Wächter family archives - central to my books East West Street and The Ratline.  I discovered a letter written by a man named Walther Rauff to Otto Wächter. In this letter, Rauff – an SS man, unknown to me at the time -  tells Wächter that he is in Damascus and advises him against joining him in the Arab world. He suggests South America instead. Wächter died in Rome, so never made it to South America. But Rauff, whom I discovered to be the inventor of gas trucks used to murder Jews and many others, followed his own advice, and eventually left Damascus with his wife and two children for Italy, then Ecuador, where he arrived in 1950. He lived in Quito for a few years, initially employed by a Mercedes-Benz dealership. He met some Chileans who convinced him to move with his family to their country. He passed through Santiago, unsuccessfully looking for work, before finally settling in Patagonia, in Punta Arenas, where he became the manager of a king crab cannery. Curious to find out more about Rauff and his alleged links with Pinochet, I went to Punta Arenas.

The presence of Nazis in Chile is now well known. The country has had a long relationship with Germany, dating way back to before the Second World War, and which is still very much evidenced today.

When I first went to Chile in 2000, some said that Argentina is the Italy of South America, while Chile is its Germany. I met a few people with Germanic surnames, many of whom are descendants of Germans who settled in the 19th century. Their presence is still very visible, for example at the Colonia Dignidad, renamed Villa Baviera, located 400 kilometres south of Santiago. In this German-populated enclave, atrocities were committed under the leadership of Paul Schäfer, ranging from the torture of opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship to acts of paedophilia against young residents. A powerful six-part documentary series has recently been produced by Netflix on the subject. But relations between Germany and Chile, which go back a long way, are close and not limited to such tragic cases.

Your investigation into Walter Rauff has led you to spend a great deal of time over the last few years in southern Patagonia, what are your thoughts on the area?

My first encounter with Patagonia was in a book I first read around 1979, Bruce Chatwin's wonderful In Patagonia. The book was written in France, but it recounts his six-month journey to Patagonia from Argentina to Tierra del Fuego, devoting some pages to Punta Arenas, and a chapter to Walther Rauff. It's a city with an exceptional history. Before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, it was an obligatory passage for journey between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in the Strait of Magellan. You can sense the city's past grandeur in its urban planning and architecture. The buildings are impressive, it's immediately clear that it was once very prosperous. Chatwin describes the influences: German, Spanish, English, Croatian.

What did you hope to find in Punta Arenas?

I travelled to Punta Arenas in search of Rauff's story. I knew that he’d arrived there in 1958, and managed a king crab cannery that exported all over the world. I wanted to see the place where he lived and worked, to try and answer the question that runs through all my books: how can a genocidaire, hunted for his role in the gas trucks and extermination of hundreds of thousands of people, make a new life in a faraway city, as if nothing had happened? I soon learned that the people of Punta Arenas knew what he had done. I wanted to understand how you could live openly, without even changing your name, amongst those who accept your presence without batting an eyelid.

Did you find an answer to that question?

The answer lies in the history of Punta Arenas itself. It was very well illustrated by Felipe Gálvez in his superb film The Settlers (Los Colonos), which won an award at Cannes in 2023. The film looks back at the extermination of Tierra del Fuego's indigenous population, including the Selk'nam, who were virtually wiped out between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The film is a reminder that Tierra del Fuego is itself a land of genocide. The region's inhabitants know of genocide, as they live silently in an area where the indigenous populations were exterminated. To understand how Punta Arenas came to welcome Walter Rauff, one needs to go back further, and understand the wider history of the region.

What were your first impressions of Punta Arenas?

We arrived at an airport, quite a distance from the city. It's flat, grey, windy, and not so warm. Punta Arenas is one of the closest cities to Antarctica, at the end of the world, which you feel. On the road between the airport and the city, you see the remnants of the city's commercial and industrial past through the dilapidated buildings from the early 20th century. And when you get to the centre, you discover a little marvel, with 19th-century colonial-style buildings. I stayed in a hotel housed in a former palace on the Plaza de Armas, the city's central square, stepping back in time to an earlier century. And then there are the people you meet, with names from across Europe, a meeting point for diverse civilisations. And then you walk to the middle of the Plaza de Armas, and come across a huge statue of a colonizer with a Selk'nam Indian at his feet. Here you understand the history of the place.

Statues like those are dotted around the country, reminders of all that remains to be done for Chile’s indigenous population, particularly the Mapuche.

As in most South American countries, there are tensions between Chile's indigenous populations and its inhabitants of European origin. An effort was made during the recent constitutional reform process, which was ultimately unsuccessful, to better recognize the place of Amerindian groups, like the Mapuche, in the life of the country. But tensions remain. Chile is a country dominated by colonizers, even if truth about the past is becoming better known. A few years ago, the Chilean government acknowledged the genocide of the Selk'nam people. It's a long-term process; we're only at the beginning, but things are moving forward, maybe more so in Santiago than in Punta Arenas.

Did you feel welcomed by the people of Punta Arenas? One might assume they wouldn't take kindly to the arrival of someone who had come to stir up memories of a uncomfortable past …

The day after my arrival, I was scheduled to give a lecture at the University of Punta Arenas on my research into the relationship between Walter Rauff and Augusto Pinochet. The event had been organized by a friend in Santiago. I didn't want to keep a low profile; to the contrary, I wanted to publicize my visit and hope that people with memories of Rauff might attend and share them with me. I soon realized that many in Punta Arenas knew Walter Rauff, at least by name. There were around a hundred people in the conference room, and when the time came for questions, two or three were critical of me. Why had I come all the way to Punta Arenas to investigate a German genocidaire, when there were many lesser-known Chileans who deserved attention?

Almost forty years after his death, what traces of Walter Rauff's presence were you able to find in Punta Arenas?

As a lawyer working at international courts and tribunals, I know the importance of establishing the facts. So I've long known that it's vital to investigate the places where the crimes occur. I do a lot of work in the field of crimes against humanity and genocide, and I've learned that to understand these things, you must visit the places, not just read about them. So, I wanted to find where Rauff lived and worked, the streets he walked, and the people who knew him. I worried that all this had disappeared, but it hadn’t. I found places and met people who worked with him. Now in their eighties and nineties, they remember his character and his relationship with the city. As soon as you start to scratch the surface, you soon discover the stories that are unspoken. Rauff felt safe in Puntas Arenas. He was at the end of the world, surrounded by people who were understanding, or uncaring, of the atrocities he committed in Europe. In Punta Arenas I got the feeling that you're in a city of silences, a place where, at least publicly, you don't talk. But when you start talking in private, the stories come out. That's why I went back several times, to meet the people, to establish a bond that would allow memories to be shared, the imagination to be unlocked. That's what fascinates me: uncovering the secret life of a city. There's the external appearance, and then there's what's really going on, but not immediately observable.

How did the people you spoke to portray Rauff?

I met some of the women who worked in Rauff's cannery, where they made the preserves. They described him as a man who drank and smoked. One woman I met told me that in Punta Arenas, everyone knew what Rauff had done but didn't care because it was far away in time and place.  He was “el jefe”, the boss, and they needed money. They described a man who always went out with his dog to protect himself, a man who lived in fear. West Germany had issued an extradition request against him, and Mossad was interested in him. Not a day went by that he didn't think of the fate of his former colleague Adolf Eichmann,  who was kidnapped in Argentina, then tried and executed in Israel. Rauff lived in fear of suffering the same fate. In Porvenir, on the other side of the Strait of Magellan, he owned a cabin, which still exists and which I was able to visit. From there, on a small hill, through the window, he could see all who approached.

Your frequent visits to Chile have also led to a number of literary discoveries and encounters.

Indeed. Chilean literature plays an important role in my research. Starting with Roberto Bolaño, who was inspired by Walther Rauff in his By Night in Chile and in Nazi Literature in the Americas. In By Night in Chile, Bolaño has a priest talk about his life under the Pinochet dictatorship. In one episode, he recounts his meeting with a Punta Arenas businessman who works in a cannery - an obvious allusion to Rauff - who offers to give Augusto Pinochet lessons in the history of Marxism. This seems invented, but there are elements of truth in it. What interests me in Bolaño's work is the interplay between fact and fiction, which echoes the questions I ask myself about Punta Arenas, as I try to sort out the truth from the invented accounts I gather of the city's past.

I spend my life trying to establish facts and prove things in court, so, for me, Bolaño's ability to open up the imagination, traversing from the real to the imaginary, is fascinating. The blurring between the real and the fictional can be found not only in Chatwin, but also in Galo Ghigliotto's fine novel El Museo de la Bruma (2019), for which I have prefaced the English edition to be published later this year. A Chilean student assisting me with this project brought to my attention this book, which tells the story of a mysterious “Museum of the Mist”, created some forty years ago in Punta Arenas, but recently destroyed by a fire carried by the Patagonian winds. The museum consisted of three large halls: the first was dedicated to Julio Popper, a 19th-century Romanian explorer and engineer; the second to film director Alain-Paul Mallard and Bruce Chatwin; and the third to Walther Rauff. The museum whose collections Galo Ghigliotto reconstructed never actually existed, but it's a moving book that opens the imagination to Punta Arenas and Chilean Patagonia. I met Ghigliotto in Santiago, where he lives, and we have become friends.

Other Chilean books that have touched me deeply include Mariana Callejas' La Larga Noche (1981) and Pedro Lemebel's De Perlas y Cicatrices (1998). At the heart of these two books, as well as By Night in Chile, is a story that touches on a house in Santiago, a place where a literary salon was held on the second floor even as a torture chamber operated in the basement. This building actually existed and belonged to Mariana Callejas and her husband, an American who worked for the Chilean secret service. Bolaño was inspired by Lemebel's writings on the subject, in which he also wrote about Rauff. It was from all these books that I became interested in Walther Rauff's possible collaboration with the Pinochet regime.

You've also worked on Chilean films.

You absolutely must see Patricio Guzmán's trilogy on Chile's recent history, La Batalla de Chile. It is one of the great documentaries. He speaks of events he lived through and understood with admirable finesse. I also recommend Pablo Larraín's film No, about the 1988 Pinochet referendum which, against all odds, ended in defeat for Pinochet.

Could you tell us about a few places in Punta Arenas that are particularly dear to you?

There are many places in Punta Arenas that have become dear to me. First there's theWake Up café, which I visit each morning, or the restaurant at the Hotel Savoy, where René, the waiter serves a fine plate of centolla, the meat of the king crab. Then, of course, there's Walter Rauff's old house, preserved in a ski resort. And the town museum, which houses a painting of ducks by José Ruiz Blasco, whose son, Pablo Picasso, is said to have painted the ducks’ feet. And the Shackleton Bar, in the Hotel José Nogueiro, which was once the Sara Braun Palace. I also like the offices of the Prensa Austral newspaper, marked by an ancient copper plaque. Or the home of Charlie Milward, Bruce Chatwin’s relative, at 895 Avenida España. But of all the places in Punta Arenas, the most emblematic is a corner of Plaza des Armas, near the Hotel José Nogueiro, overlooking the ocean and Tierra del Fuego and Dawson Island, and a pedestal on which the bust of the coloniser José Ménendez was once erected, observed by Chatwin. Today the pedestal stands empty, the bust having been knocked off in a protest.